Youth in Revolt

Rachel Kushner’s “The Flamethrowers.”

Kushner takes on the world of seventies radicals in a book that, like its voluble characters, is in love with the artifice of storytelling.Credit Illustration by Tyler Jacobson / Portrait Reference Beth Herzhaft

Put aside, for the moment, the long postwar argument between the rival claims of realistic and anti-realistic fiction—the seasoned triumphs of the traditional American novel on one side, and the necessary innovations of postmodern fiction on the other. It was never very edifying anyway, each camp busily caricaturing the other. And don’t bother with the newest “debate,” about the properly desirable amount of “reality” that American fiction should currently possess. (Twenty grams, twenty-five grams?) Some novelists, neither obviously traditional nor obviously experimental, neither flagrantly autobiographical nor airily fantastical, blast through such phantom barricades. Often, this is because they have a natural, vivacious talent for telling stories; and these stories—the paradox is important—seem fictively real, cunningly alive. Novelistic vivacity, the great unteachable, the unschooled enigma, has a way of making questions of form appear scholastic.

Rachel Kushner’s second novel, “The Flamethrowers” (Scribner), is scintillatingly alive, and also alive to artifice. It ripples with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales, and hapless adventures: Kushner is never not telling a story. It is nominally a historical novel (it’s set in the mid-seventies), and, I suppose, also a realist one (it works within the traditional grammar of verisimilitude). But it manifests itself as a pure explosion of now: it catches us in its mobile, flashing present, which is the living reality it conjures on the page at the moment we are reading. Consider Kushner’s vivid descriptions, near the start of the book, of racing and motorcycling. The novel’s narrator, an artist in her early twenties nicknamed Reno (it’s where she’s from), is obsessed with speed, machines, and land-speed records. (Art seems to be a subsidiary concern.) When we first see her, she is riding her Moto Valera motorbike from Nevada to Utah, to take part in the land-speed trials on the Bonneville Salt Flats. In a cool, hospitable, ingenuous tone, she tells us about herself. Her mother was a switchboard operator, “and if her past included something akin to noir, it was only the gritty part, the part about being female, poor, and alone, which in a film was enough of a circumstance to bring in the intrigue, but in her life it attracted only my father.” As she approaches the salt flats, the prose begins to glimmer:

On the short drive from town out to the salt flats, the high desert gleamed under the morning sun. White, sand, rose, and mauve—those were the colors here, sand edging to green in places, with sporadic bursts of powdery yellow, weedy sunflowers blooming three-on-the-tree. . . . Pure white stretching so far into the distance that its horizon revealed a faint curve of the Earth. I heard the sonic rip of a military jet, like a giant trowel being dragged through wet concrete, but saw only blue above, a raw and saturated blue that seemed cut from an inner wedge of sky.

It is easy enough for a good writer (and this is very good prose—that “inner wedge of sky” perfectly capturing the living blueness of atmosphere) to do something verbally fine with the extremities of desert. What is impressive about these early pages is how easily Kushner also begins to tell stories of the desert. Reno informs us that, as a young girl, she loved the celebrated land-speed-record holder, Flip Farmer. “I had a poster above my bed of Flip and his winning car, the Victory of Samothrace. Flip with his breakfast cereal smile, in his zip-up land speed suit, made of a silvery-blue ripstop cloth that refracted to lavender at angles and folds, and lace-up racing boots that were the color of vanilla ice cream.” She got Flip’s autograph when she was twelve, the year that he almost died, after crashing at five hundred and twenty-two miles per hour. Two superb pages recount the agonizing, slow-motion last minutes of that accident—how the car shot up a ten-foot-high salt dike, and how Flip Farmer’s world then went vertical:

A quadrangle of plain, cloudless sky. A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death. If there had been just one puffy trawler, a little tugboat of a cloud, even so much as a cotton ball of vapor against the blue, he would have hoped. There was only blue. He was headed for the drainage ditch on the other side of the dike. It was filled with rainwater. The Victory slammed into it. As it sank, nose first, Flip desperately popped the canopy. There was no way he’d get the canopy open once the car was underwater. He tore off his oxygen mask and tried to unfold himself from the driver’s seat.

Flip Farmer did not die but “recaptured the world record the season after the Watts riots and kept it until last year, 1975, when an Italian stole it away in a rocket-fueled vehicle and Flip officially retired.”

Reno arrives, parks her bike on the flats. “Pink gasoline and synthetic red engine oil soaked into the salt like butcher shop residue. The salt itself, up close, was the color of unbleached sugar, but the sunlight used it as if it were the brightest white. . . . I heard the silky glide of toolbox drawers, the tink of wrenches dropped on the hard salt. Tanned little boys darted past me on bicycles, wearing mesh baseball caps propped high on their heads, in mimicry of the fathers and uncles who crowded around workbenches, bent over vehicles, their belts buckled off center to avoid scratching the paint.” And so it continues, the novel’s reality level as high and blindingly brilliant as the Utah sunlight. Later, we will meet the Italian who stole Flip’s record—Didi Bombonato, with his “pocked, sunken cheeks, thin bluish lips, and eyes like raisins, which made him seem angry and also a little dimwitted,” his lustrous hair “feathered into elaborate croissant layers.” And Reno will briefly hold the record as the fastest woman in the world, at 308.506 m.p.h., achieved in Didi’s special streamlined Valera car, the Spirit of Italy.

But, if Kushner’s reality level is high, so is her fiction level. Seduced by the confident storytelling, lulled by the dazzle of its disclosures (“They dragged him to safety just before the hydrazine ignited, sending a boom, and then a far bigger boom, followed by a violent bubbling, as the Victory of Samothrace exploded underwater like fuel rods in a reactor pool”), I had lazily assumed that, even if the Moto Valera was a fictional brand of motorbike, then Flip Farmer was probably an actual American racer. But he is as fictional as the novel’s narrator (though perhaps based on Craig Breedlove, an actual five-time land-speed-record holder). Flip and his accident, Didi Bombonato and his croissant hair, the Valera mechanics, the whole Valera company, the tanned boys on their bicycles—they are all magnificently made up, brief blooms of the Utah desert.

Kushner employs a similarly eerie confidence throughout her novel, which constantly entwines the invented with the real, and she often uses the power of invention to give her fiction the authenticity of the reportorial, the solidity of the historical. Her first novel, “Telex from Cuba” (2008), did something similar with the Cuba of the nineteen-fifties, whereby parts of the history of the United Fruit Company were mixed with her inventions, and a dense political and human portrait emerged. Likewise, “The Flamethrowers” offers an extended and convincing biography of the enormous Valera company: we hear about T. P. Valera, the company’s founder, who fought in the First World War in the Arditi (the Italian assault brigade); his dabbling with young Italian Futurists; his membership in the Fascist Party; how the company expanded, in 1942, to manufacture tires, and its racist and punitive treatment of the Brazilian Indian workers who produced the rubber for the tires; how the company helped to build Italy’s modern road system, in the fifties; and how it became disastrously involved in the strikes and revolutionary guerrilla actions of the seventies.

Most American novelists, with this amount of information to impart, would be unable to resist flourishing the labor of their research: we are all supposed to revere writers who know things about the world (seventies funk! Big Coal!), notwithstanding the non-mysterious and equalizing interventions of Google. But Kushner’s Italian company is invented (albeit with dashes of Pirelli, Fiat, Moto Guzzi), and is thus both solid and curiously spectral; and, besides, she calmly subdues her material, inhabits it as a true novelist should, so that the Valera story emerges as worked narrative, not as labored data.

Kushner’s narrator is riding a Moto Valera in Utah because her well-connected boyfriend supplied it. A year earlier, Reno had landed in New York, a tall, attractive twenty-one-year-old, and quickly met Sandro Valera, T. P. Valera’s younger son. Sandro, unlike his elder and much more conservative brother, Roberto, who now runs the Italian company, has forsworn business for art. He makes minimalist aluminum boxes, and shows at the (fictional) Erwin Frame Gallery, where a woman behind the counter nods severely at Reno when she enters, “glancing up through eyeglass frames that were black and round like little handcuffs.” Sandro is fourteen years older than Reno, wealthy, self-assured, good-looking; Reno is attracted to him, and seems happy anyway to be a picaro of the Manhattan art world. She goes to all the parties and hears the stories, and reports on the egotists, storytellers, and fabricators (in both senses) she encounters there: “I had always admired people who had a palpable sense of their own future, who constructed plans and then followed them.” This is not Reno’s aimless approach: “Chance, to me, had a kind of absolute logic to it.” Most of her adventures in this novel—from Utah to the Village to her later involvements with violent leftists in Rome—occur because she just gets in the way of them.

But, if Reno is wide-eyed and even dangerously porous, Kushner watches the New York art world of the late seventies with sardonic precision and lancing humor, using Reno’s reportorial hospitality to fill her pages with lively portraits and outrageous cameos. Kushner’s New York is full of performers, boasters, wastrels, aesthetic activists. Most of the artists are great storytellers; many of them are committed fantasists. One of the most poignant is Reno’s friend Giddle, who works at a coffee shop, the Trust E, on Lafayette Street. At one time, she hung around Warhol’s Factory and had inchoate artistic ambitions. She plans to go to mortuary school, and covers her failures with bitter self-defense: “Anyone can be a success. . . . It’s so much more interesting to not want that.”

There is a local figure, famous for carrying a long pole over his shoulder, painted with barber stripes. Giddle tells Reno, “It’s his thing, that pole. No sellable works, just disruption. Goes to gallery openings, bonks people on the head by accident.” There is Stanley Kastle, of whose art Sandro has this to say to Reno: “All Stanley had to do, at this point, to keep his art career going, was order neon tubes in various colors from a manufacturer, and his assistants arranged the tubes according to an algorithm he’d invented long ago, as if to subtract himself from the production of his own art.” When not organizing this operation, Stanley records monologues on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Kushner reproduces one of these recordings, over four and a half long pages; it’s meandering, pretentious, oddly likable, banal. Even Stanley concedes that he doesn’t make a lot of sense, and that the main problem may just be that “men over fifty can’t stop talking.”

The novel’s greatest talker is Sandro’s best friend, Ronnie Fontaine, whose photographs (such as we hear about them) seem nugatory, but whose stories are captivating. Ronnie once made a “blithe declaration” that he wanted to “photograph every living person. Sandro said it was Ronnie’s best work and something on the level of a poem: a gesture with no possible rebuttal. It didn’t matter that it was never made.” But perhaps his stories are his best works. We soon understand that nothing Ronnie says can be trusted. Yet he has all of Kushner’s uncanny novelistic confidence. He has probably never been in prison, for instance (it emerges that he has channelled the experience of his criminal brother), but, when he talks about his time inside, you believe in it:

I know about confinement and boredom and midnight fire drills. Amplified orders banging around the prison yard like the evening prayer call from the mosques along Atlantic Avenue. I know pimento loaf. Powdered eggs. Riots. The experience of being hosed down with bleach and disinfectant like a garbage can. I know about an erotics of necessity.

Notice how Kushner gently tweaks the tail of that tale, and makes the slightly Sontagian proclamation sound, in Ronnie’s telling, authentically silly: “I know about an erotics of necessity.” Kushner has become a sharp comic writer (her new novel is much funnier than her first), and has had the advantage of having spent several years watching the contemporary Manhattan literary and art scene, as an editor at Grand Street and Bomb. She is funny not at the expense of contemporary art but at the expense of the people who make that art, seeing with clear eyes their bluster and pantomime. She scours her chosen period for its extravagance and histrionics; the parallel with today’s ambition market is obvious. Small worlds resemble each other first.

Kushner is also a diligent historical novelist, which involves seeing differences. In “The Flamethrowers,” she focusses on the highly politicized world of post-Nixon nineteen-seventies America. One of her characters is the somewhat sinister Burdmoore Model, apparently a terrible artist (he talks about art “parting her labia”), better known as the leader of a radical group called the Motherfuckers, who went quickly from anarchism to violence in the late sixties, and ended up stabbing a landlord. Reno asks Model why his group was called the Motherfuckers, and receives this reply: “Because we hated women. . . . You think I’m joking. Women had no place in the movement unless they wanted to cook us a meal or clean the floor or strip down. There are people who’ve tried to renovate our ideas, claim we weren’t chauvinists. Don’t believe it. We had some heavy shit to work out. But we were idealists, too. We saw a future of people singing and dancing, making love and masturbating in the streets.”

The scene that Reno moves through is more casually sexist than Model’s outright misogyny. The chauvinism seems bound up with the arrogance and attitudinizing, the sheer performative relentlessness of the men (and occasional women) who pass in and out of Reno’s life. Sandro tells Reno, “Sex is not about exchange values. . . . It’s a gift economy.” But Reno seems to be doing most of the gifting, and, when the time comes and another woman makes herself available, Sandro will throw Reno over with practiced ease.

“The Flamethrowers” can be seen as a contemporary rewriting of Flaubert’s novel of 1869, “Sentimental Education.” Reno, like Frédéric Moreau, is a frustratingly malleable figure, a hero almost vacuous except for the exactitude of her noticing. Both protagonists are infatuated with older love objects. Both books offer dense pictures of cities riven by political protest—Paris in Flaubert’s case, New York and Rome in Kushner’s. Both move smoothly from portraits of bohemians to sketches of aristocrats, and the minor characters are in danger of possessing more vitality than the drifting protagonists. Kushner seems most Flaubertian when Reno travels to Italy with Sandro, and spends several miserable weeks in the Valera family’s villa above Lake Como. At the villa, there are nicely barbarous walk-ons, such as the Count of Bolzano, “a little man whose round belly pressed against his mint-green shirt, which was monogrammed on the lower left, over his spleen.” Or Sandro’s grand, snobbish mother, who was once beautiful but now has a complexion “like wet flour, clammy and pale, with the exception of her nose, which had a curiously dark cast to it, a shadow of black under the thin tarp of skin, as if her nose had trapped the toxins from a lifetime of rich food and heavy wines.” Or Sandro’s objectionable elder brother, Roberto, the stern capitalist, who has this to say about the activists and bolshie university students who are thronging Rome: “With long, ratty hair and stupefied expressions, like they’ve figured out how to empty their minds of thought. They have nothing to communicate but the cretinous message anyone can see: I have long hair.”

A little conveniently, Kushner needs to have Reno in Italy in order for her novel to play out its dark history. In Italy, Reno is abandoned by Sandro. She runs off in anger to Rome, where she falls in with welcoming radicals. She witnesses a violent demonstration and is teargassed. The political menace that has been seething throughout the novel finally explodes. The Valera factories have been subject to labor action, strikes, guerrilla sorties. Finally, Roberto gets his comeuppance and is kidnapped by the Red Brigades; Reno may be unwittingly complicit in this act. The novel gets more exciting, perhaps, but at some cost to the coherence and depth of the writing. Toward the end of the book, Kushner offers up the secret of her vivid title. The Arditi, the assault regiment in which T. P. Valera fought, was known as the Black Flames. When Sandro was small, he had a set of paper dolls of the Arditi. He especially loved the flamethrowers, “with their twin tanks and their gas mask. . . . The flamethrower was never, ever defensive. He was pure offense, overrunning enemy lines.”

Kushner’s title seems to suggest that her characters are all “flamethrowers,” that the anarchists and the radical artists of New York, the Red Brigades with their Molotov cocktails, and the proto-Fascistic Arditi were all committed in their different ways to “pure offense.” Or perhaps she means that the original flamethrowers of the early decades of the twentieth century invited the warring replies of the later flamethrowers. This may be figuratively true, but it belies the painstaking political storytelling of her novel, which is highly attentive to ideological distinctions. Kushner’s invented history makes much of the violence of the Valera company’s origins, of its connections to Fascism, to Italian Futurism, to Mussolini, and to capitalist exploitation in the jungles of Brazil. It is true that the Arditi had a historical relation to Futurism—Marinetti revered them, and D’Annunzio used them, and many Arditi did become Fascists. But the implied connection between early-twentieth-century radical right-wing art and later twentieth-century radical left-wing art, and between right-wing political activism and left-wing political activism, seems like an overloading of the novel’s thematic circuits, a wrongheaded desire to make everything signify. Kushner’s title implies the kind of political equivalence that might amount to a Flaubertian ironic nullification, a nihilistic cynicism beyond politics—decades of similar rapacity, playacting, art-making, and anarchistic “offense,” all of it subsumed within the titular “flamethrowing.” Kushner, though, is anything but politically cynical, and her novel is an achievement precisely because it resists either paranoid connectedness or knowing universalism. On the contrary, it succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive. ♦

James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007.